Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/07
Ah, C. The best lingua franca we have… because we have no other lingua francas. Linguae franca. Surgeons general? C is fairly old — 44 years, now! — and comes from a time when there were possibly more architectures than programming languages. It works well for what it is, and what it is is a relatively simple layer of indirection atop assembly. Alas, the popularity of C has led to a number of programming languages’ taking significant cues from its design, and parts of its design are… slightly questionable. I’ve gone through some common features that probably should’ve stayed in C and my justification for saying so. The features are listed in rough order from (I hope) least to most controversial. The idea is that C fans will give up when I call it “weakly typed” and not even get to the part where I rag on braces. Wait, crap, I gave it away.
Great re-read towards the end of the year: [WayBack] Let’s stop copying C / fuzzy notepad
Via: [WayBack] Old and busted: emacs vs vi. New and hot: Language war, everybody against everybody else. – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+
–jeroen
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Posted in .NET, APL, Awk, bash, BASIC, C, C#, C++, COBOL, CoffeeScript, CommandLine, D, Delphi, Development, F#, Fortran, Go (golang), Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, PowerShell, Python, Ruby, Scala, Scripting, Software Development, TypeScript, VB.NET, VBScript | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/11/02
Quoted in full because even 2.5 years later, it’s just too funny:
- Python: What if everything was a dict?
- Java: What if everything was an object?
- JavaScript: What if everything was a dict *and* an object?
- C: What if everything was a pointer?
- APL: What if everything was an array?
- Tcl: What if everything was a string?
- Prolog: What if everything was a term?
- LISP: What if everything was a pair?
- Scheme: What if everything was a function?
- Haskell: What if everything was a monad?
- Assembly: What if everything was a register?
- Coq: What if everything was a type/proposition?
- COBOL: WHAT IF EVERYTHING WAS UPPERCASE?
- C#: What if everything was like Java, but different?
- Ruby: What if everything was monkey patched?
- Pascal: BEGIN What if everything was structured? END
- C++: What if we added everything to the language?
- C++11: What if we forgot to stop adding stuff?
- Rust: What if garbage collection didn’t exist?
- Go: What if we tried designing C a second time?
- Perl: What if shell, sed, and awk were one language?
- Perl6: What if we took the joke too far?
- PHP: What if we wanted to make SQL injection easier?
- VB: What if we wanted to allow anyone to program?
- VB.NET: What if we wanted to stop them again?
- Forth: What if everything was a stack?
- ColorForth: What if the stack was green?
- PostScript: What if everything was printed at 600dpi?
- XSLT: What if everything was an XML element?
- Make: What if everything was a dependency?
- m4: What if everything was incomprehensibly quoted?
- Scala: What if Haskell ran on the JVM?
- Clojure: What if LISP ran on the JVM?
- Lua: What if game developers got tired of C++?
- Mathematica: What if Stephen Wolfram invented everything?
- Malbolge: What if there is no god?
–jeroen
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Posted in APL, Assembly Language, BASIC, C, C#, C++, COBOL, Development, EPS/PostScript, Fun, Go (golang), Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Makefile, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Quotes, Ruby, Scala, Scripting, Software Development, T-Shirt quotes, Turbo Prolog, VB.NET, XML/XSD, XSLT | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/04/09
mos6502 wrote a really nice post on G+ with this quote:
“This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.”
A must read if you ever used Microsoft BASIC on a 6502 machine.
Lots of link to various sources of the Microsoft BASIC (it was developed on a PDP-10 that could even run the outputed 6502 assembly!)
–jeroen
via: We’ve already had some posts on the BASIC programming language for the 6502,….
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Posted by jpluimers on 2014/05/01
Though a lot of people dislike the language, it survived until today.
So: happy 50th birthday BASIC!
BASIC Begins at Dartmouth
At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born.
–jeroen
via:
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Posted in BASIC, Development, Software Development | 1 Comment »